A24’s “The Drama” with Robert Pattinson and Zendaya is the type of movie that can spark interesting and possibly revelatory conversations. It inspires debate and perhaps memories of past loves and speculations about present ones.
Charlie (Pattinson) and Emily (Zendaya) meet at a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They hit it off, they fall in love, and in modern fairy tale fashion, they decide to tie the knot. The two opt for a ceremony with all its trappings.
As the couple practices their dance in a studio — the question arises if they must do this dance, if the choreography has to be executed right. Of course, they have to — it’s part and parcel of a traditional reception program. The dance instructor says, it’s a wedding, “it’s performative by nature.”
On the surface we have this gorgeous couple, so in love. Over the pre-wedding menu tasting, a secret about Emily’s past is revealed, and all of a sudden, Charlie’s soul is turned upside down.
Now he wonders: how well does he know Emily? If real love means knowing both the best and the worst things about a person and still loving them, shouldn’t we be given a chance to know important truths about them? How well do we really know those we love? Where do you draw the line and what are your red flags when it comes to letting someone inside the final frontier of personal spaces.
Zendaya and Pattinson are extremely talented and utterly watchable. They’re also clearly in demand — the two return on screen in Chris Nolan’s much awaited “The Odyssey” in July and in the finale of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” this December.
“The Drama” is directed by Kristoffer Borgli. Sonny Bunch of The Bulwark has compared his stories to Norwegian filmmakers currently in the spotlight like Ruben Östlund (“Triangle of Sadness”) and Halina Reijn (“Baby Girl”) observing they “have a keen outsider’s eye for the absurdities of American life and the conversational taboos under which we live.”
“The Drama” upends traditional rom-coms and takes us down what can be very uncomfortable territory. The drama here is more like the chaos, the mental spiral, and the nervous tension; the dominoes that fall because of a single revelation.
Incidentally, there were a string of horror film trailers from Thailand, Korea, US and Ireland before they showed this movie. I keep wondering if it could have been intentional.
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“The Drama” is out in local cinemas.
